Bernard Ingham: Bile, threats and hate are currency of a bankrupt Left

No acknowledgment that as a civil servant of 12 years standing I was obliged to work for whatever Government the voters chose. No recognition that over those 12 years I had worked for three Labour Ministers (Barbara Castle, Eric Varley and Tony Benn) as well as three Conservatives – Robert Carr, Maurice Macmillan and Lord Carrington.

Just venom that I had chosen to work for the Tories again.

I often think about this little episode when I read of the sheer viciousness of attacks during the election against Tory candidates and, to be fair, the bullying of Labour moderates, especially women.

It seems that the new currency of political discourse is foul-mouthed abuse and threats – even racism – apparently orchestrated on the internet by some on the hard Left, who Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn fails to rein in.

It is all very well to deplore this – as we must, or it will become the norm – but it is entirely another thing to fathom the utter contempt for Tories held by, for example, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.

Such attitudes are so rife that I am told it is unwise to reveal you voted Tory in that so-called distinguished seat of learning, Cambridge.

What on earth lies behind this contorted-faced contempt for all things Tory?

As one with impeccable working class credentials, I must confess that in my younger days I abhorred the privilege that the Tories represented. But Alec Douglas-Home was the last of the Tory toffs in No 10 – if you can ignore David Cameron’s new money. Ted Heath, Thatcher, John Major and now Theresa May were not born with silver spoons in their mouths.

I suspect that certainly Thatcher, Major and May, having lived among the working class, had or have more in common with them than Islington’s middle class revolutionaries who stand behind Corbyn.

It is – or was in 1945 – easy to understand why Winston Churchill fell after leading us through the Second World War. The public had had enough of the two-nation Twenties and the unemployment of the 1930s. And people are still in love with the welfare state that Clement Attlee provided, even though it was soon fraying at the edges.

Even Aneurin Bevan worried about “the cascade of pills down the nation’s throat” before prescription charges.

Yet before all this the Tories had a long history of industrial and social reform. Have the scoffers never heard of the admittedly controversial Sir Robert Peel; the Earl of Shaftesbury; Richard Oastler or “One-Nation” Benjamin Disraeli? And it was a Liberal – David Lloyd George – who laid the foundations of the welfare state in 1911.

What has the Left to offer after Attlee? Harold Wilson? He wore himself out holding his fractious party together, with the Open University perhaps his proudest innovation. Jim Callaghan? Like Wilson, was hammered by the nominally staunch Labour unions into defeat after the 1979-80 winter of discontent.

As for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, nobody who is compos mentis can possibly hold them out as shining examples of Labour in government.

There is not much to admire in Blair’s “Third Way” socialism or Brown’s “prudence”. Brown should hang his head in shame over leaving a £153bn budget deficit from which we still suffer.

So why on earth is it that the Corbynists so wholeheartedly hate the Tories? I can think of four reasons:

1. Give a dog a bad name and it sticks. The word “Tory” stinks in their nostrils regardless of the balance of history; like the Bourbons they have learned nothing from it.

2. All the best revolutionaries are middle class – as one minister once told me instancing Marx and Lenin. They hadn’t – and now Corbyn hasn’t – a clue how the other half lives.

3. The parlous state of British education, and especially university education, rotten as it is to the core 
with political prejudice instead of academic rigour and impartiality. 
Given their record, I would not pay the average economics professor in washers.

4. The relative Tory success over time in managing the economy and adapting social and economic life to the needs of the people.

Without a moderate Labour Party, the only bulwark in our democracy against a hard Left dictatorship is a responsible, reforming Tory Government. Hence their sheer bile.